Has your heart been broken? What person alive hasn’t faced the ending of a relationship and – worse – been jilted by a friend, lover, business partner, employer – someone you loved or at least liked and respected? It can be brutal.

I am a songwriter. My name is Lorelei Loveridge – and I hail from Canada, left my country in 1996 and headed out for the world in hopes that my dreams could be found in the wild blue yonder. I’ve listened to music my whole life long and admired the artistry of a great many.

From the time I discovered Joan Baez and began to cover her version of ‘Let It Be’ by the Beatles and fell in love with the sounds and spirit of Tracy Chapman, Sarah McLachlan, Sinead O’Connor, The Indigo Girls, Ani Difranco and so many more on the festival stages of Western Canada…I found the courage in these women – to take their instruments out into the world and make beauty where tragedy lives – heroic. They sang about things, too, that made me laugh. But their capacity to touch my heart and heal the places where I cried had that strange effect that music does: it lifted me out of my melancholy.

It gave me fire, too, and sold me on my destiny to go out into the world and sing my songs.

Some of my greatest influences have been:

Joni Mitchell

Loreena McKennitt

Melissa Etheridge

Melissa Ferrick

Cris Williamson

Holly Near

Mae Moore

Jann Arden

Janice Ian

Dee Carstenson

Jennifer Berezan

Sheri Ulrich

Jessica Schoenberg

On the other side of the Atlantic there have been two others who have inspired me. These are Manchester’s ‘first lady of music’ herself Kirsty Almeida, born in Gibraltar, and banjo-picking trans-Atlantic songwriter Zoe Mulford from the U.S. who first showed me the ropes as we toured the surrounding area of my chosen home Manchester, England all the way down to Southhampton and up to Northern Scotland.

I would be remiss to mention the comfort of travelling with a band of women and one creative photographer who have made this journey about so much more than music: Rosanna Lea, Heather Greenbank, Debbie Busby and the person who documented much of that journey Anna Simon. They have been my troubadour companions and we should all have some. We were not meant to move through this world alone, really.

*****

Music has changed since then, arguably. The CD is a near relic, a calling card, but we still buy them on occasion, and I’ve noticed if there is anywhere I listen to music it’s in my car on the way to work (when I was in England – women don’t drive here in Saudi) or on the road when I’m on roadtrip (CDs or an iPod playlist). Or I listen when it’s the weekend and I feel like diving into a collection I’ve had for years that I still take pleasure in. Now I rove about with my handy dandy streaming service and continue to enjoy music in a new way. Music has a magic we’ve nearly forgotten, but not quite.

My point in talking about all of this is to introduce to you one thing that has been a healing force for me, and that is music. Sad music has a way of making us feel better. Why? Because it speaks to our emotions. Vibrationally, it engages us physically in a conversation with ourselves and we begin to tap and move to the beat, and in some cases feel at one with the singer or the songwriter. We might even dance once we’ve gotten whatever it is that’s in us out of our systems. How many times have I cried to a beautiful song, sad or not, attuned to my feelings? To feel is to heal. In classes that I teach and workshops that I lead, music is always present.

Years ago, I underwent my own transformative journey and at 19 was ‘given’ a song. It makes me smile to tell you it was Helen Reddy’s ‘I Am Woman’ and these lyrics are worth the read, for I think you’ll agree: they apply to all of us who have ever been downtrodden and come back from that into our power:

I AM WOMAN

I am woman, hear me roar

In numbers too big to ignore

And I know too much to go back and pretend

‘Cause I’ve heard it all before

And I’ve been down there on the floor

No one’s ever going to keep me down again

Whoa, yes, I am wise

But it’s wisdom born of pain

Yes, I’ve paid the price

But look how much I gained

If I have to I can do anything

I am strong (strong)

I am invincible (invincible)

I am woman

You can bend but never break me

‘Cause it only serves to make me

More determined to achieve my final goal

And I’ll come back even stronger

Not a novice any longer

‘Cause you’ve deepened the conviction in my soul

Whoa, yes, I am wise

But it’s wisdom born of pain

Yes, I’ve paid the price

But look how much I gained

If I have to I can do anything

I am strong (strong)

I am invincible (invincible)

I am woman

I am woman, watch me grow

See me standing toe-to-toe

As I spread my loving arms across the land

But I’m still an embryo

With a long, long way to go

Until I make my brother understand

Whoa, yes, I am wise

But it’s wisdom born of pain

Yes, I’ve paid the price

But look how much I gained

If I have to I can face anything

I am strong (strong)

I am invincible (invincible)

I am woman

Oh, I am woman

I am invincible

I am strong

I am woman

I am invincible

I am strong

I am woman

It’s a very unique lyric, colored with the hope and dreams of the 1970’s an era some of us grew up in as a child.

Music is in so many cases inexplicably tied to story, and what we don’t often realize or consider is just how many stories we tell in a day – one liners even: I bought three watermelons from a roadside vendor and got home to find four in the van. The wind from the Levant blew the neighbour’s garbage can over and kept me up half the night. I couldn’t sleep because a parent got angry I made his kid think but the kid came to say goodbye and wanted a selfie before he flew back to his home country.

We have a lot going on in our minds, and we are inexplicably complex creatures, we human beings. What we think affects how we feel and behave, and this can have a profound impact upon our bodies and our lives in so many ways. It also affects how others respond to us, both in real time and over time. The state of our world is, as someone recently said to me, interesting: “There are a lot of bad leaders right now.” This was in response to current world politics. She listed off the countries we all know who are in trouble and whose leaders are stirring up trouble at the expense of, really, ordinary people. There is a groundswell of power at the bottom, but to simply count the number of women in top leadership at both the governmental and corporate level really does give me pause. It’s long been a disturbing fact and trend, and I have recently begun to believe that Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook is right: we must LEAN IN. That is, we must take our rightful place at the table. We make much in the world. But our voices are not heard. Frankly, I believe that this starts with learning to hear our own voices.

So, on Fridays, in a tribute to hearing the voices of the songsters and storytelling troubadours, and also to invoke an intuitive awakening in ourselves – I love that Oprah has said she lives by intuition – this is good – this is the way – I will be introducing you to some of the music that I find healing.

I will be posting a song on Fridays to inspire you to feel, think and get in touch with your joy, your pain, your dissatisfaction, your contentment, your deepest truths and the power behind the journeys you’ve made in life and the sacrifices you may have made along the way as well as your good fortune, too. Music: the universal language. Fridays we’re going to bathe in it. If this is your 5 minute meditation per week, maybe this is it.

Maybe this is How Women Heal.

Enjoy.

And if you like…tell me what you think. Is wisdom born of pain and is music healing to you? Who, what, when, where, how? Share a favourite songwriter or story and how it has been healing to you.

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